


And then there was dark

by freyjawriter24



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Matt goes deaf, seriously freaks out about it, which is fair enough really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-08-08 09:09:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7751701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freyjawriter24/pseuds/freyjawriter24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That one scene in Daredevil (season 2, episode 2) where Matt goes completely deaf and is absolutely terrified, told from his perspective.</p>
<p>Psalm 38:13</p>
            </blockquote>





	And then there was dark

It started slowly, almost imperceptibly. Then it came all at once.

Sudden, shocking, splintering, hammering, deafening.

Deafening. That was the problem.

Noise is not just a background or aid to understanding. For me, it is the entire world itself. And then it was gone. Vanished. In an instant. Do you have any idea how terrifying that is?

I have thought and said before – I see a world on fire. I see everything through the echoes of sound waves that bounce off the surfaces of every single thing, the tiny fragments of noise even the smallest motion makes. I use a form of echolocation to build a rough picture of the world in front of me, that I cannot otherwise see. And then – for a moment, for much longer than a moment, for far too long, seemingly forever – I saw nothing. I _heard_ nothing. And it was terrifying. The world could really, truly have been on fire, and I would not have known, would not have been able to sense it until I could distinguish the heat of the flames from my own sweat, or feel the smoke in my throat and lungs, choking me – not until it was too late.

Anything could have happened. In front of me, to me, because of me, and I would have been powerless to stop it. I wouldn’t have even known it was going on. There was just nothing. No input at all. Silence.

No, worse than silence. Silence can still have sound – the creak of a chair, the song of a bird, a trickle of water, a heartbeat. I could not even hear my own heartbeat.

They say there is a room so silent they have taken sound into negative decibels. People can’t stay inside for longer than 20 minutes before they go mad from hearing their own body. I’ve often wondered how that would work for me. Since I hear so much already, would it be nice, relaxing to have a moment of peace, to only hear my own body? Or would the single sound of my heartbeat, the blood rushing through my veins, the air pulsating in my lungs, push down so hard on my eardrums it would drive me to insanity quicker than most? I don’t know.

All I know is this was worse. There were no negative decibels, there were no decibels at all, to my brain. I could _feel_ my pulse racing, my heart thundering against the inside of my chest, but I could not _hear_ a thing.

It was like I was suddenly closed off into a world of black. Not just sat in a dark room, calmly breathing and thinking. No – I was too scared to even construct a coherent thought. It was an _absence_ – the dark room did not exist, I was floating in an empty space, actually hanging on the edge of a void, the only real things in all the world the clothes on my body, the wall at my back and the hard floor I was cowering upon. If I could touch it, it was true – but I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear where to reach out to touch. There was nothing, just empty, crushing, futile, vacuous space.

I screamed, felt my vocal chords wrenching, and yet heard no sound.

I slammed my hand down again and again, hoping for a noise, an echo, a slight glimmer of light on the fiery edges of my constructed view of the room, and still there was nothing.

Only a pain in my hand and in my head, and a soul-destroying fear that _this was it_ , there was nothing else, the change was permanent. My mind couldn’t take the thought, couldn’t organise it into words, just screamed in desperate hope that this would _end now, right now, please, please, please, dear God, please, just end it, help me, kill me or end the silence, I don’t care which, just help me, Jesus._

I prayed wildly, wordlessly, soundlessly, with feeling rather than thought, like an animal that has never been taught speech. I put the force of my soul into the desperate cry to hear something, anything, to end this horrifying, agonising, torturous experience of _absolute nothingness_.

My mind shrieked, my skin burned and sweated and became drenched in cold water droplets, my hands slapped around, searching for something solid, trying to make even the vaguest hint of a sound.

I was not simply deaf – I was not hard of hearing, with an absence of sound, or a phantom, monotonous buzzing. I was devoid of any sense of sound or motion. There was nothing around me, nothing I could see. The pain in my skull ricocheted around my brain, bouncing through my neural pathways, struggling itself to produce any form of sound my body could detect. 

On a normal day, I can hear the rustle of a person’s scarf as they turn their neck from 50 feet away. I can hear the chink of change in someone’s pocket 100 meters down the road. And yet now, I could hear _nothing_. I don’t think anyone else could possibly understand that feeling. 

I grabbed at my ears to check they were still there. I grabbed my head to push the fragments of my fractured cranium back together, to either stop the pain or worsen it to the point of _forcing_ my mind to rediscover sound. My hands were shaking, my breath ragged. My mind _screeching_ into the void. 

Helpless. Powerless. Sightless. Soundless. _Nothingness_. 

And then there was the intense, lingering, heart-stopping fear that this was how I would die. Irrational – you can’t die directly from not hearing, can you? But the force of the loss was so great, my mind could not handle it. I was begging for death, but terrified of receiving my wish. Because I would never hear it coming. 

Fear, terror, horror. Shouting, screaming, shrieking, smashing. Hyperventilating. Grabbing hold of anything solid, trying to ground myself in the inevitable panic attack, and not succeeding in the slightest. Constant panic. Constant shock. Near-myocardial infarction. Near death. 

There are too many things to say, to think of, to struggle to explain. I don’t know that I can. It was indescribable, inexplicable, though I know the physical, medical reason behind it. Bullet to the head is not good for abilities based in mental conversion of data beyond normal limits to produce a perceivable understanding of the world. 

What I do know is that this was the worst possible thing that could happen to me. Beaten only by it being permanent. Which I am forever thankful it wasn’t. And now constantly live in fear that one day it could be. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone – not just in terms of taking something for granted, but in terms of being physically able to survive, cope, without it.

It was Hell.


End file.
